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Rationally Speaking is a blog maintained by Prof. Massimo Pigliucci, a philosopher at the City University of New York. The blog reflects the Enlightenment figure Marquis de Condorcet's idea of what a public intellectual (yes, we know, that's such a bad word) ought to be: someone who devotes himself to "the tracking down of prejudices in the hiding places where priests, the schools, the government, and all long-established institutions had gathered and protected them." You're welcome. Please notice that the contents of this blog can be reprinted under the standard Creative Commons license.

Wednesday, December 23, 2009

Provably Nonsense: Part I

It's only fair to mention that my relationship with postmodernism got off on the wrong foot. The black-turtleneck-clad grad student who TA’d one of my freshman year classes mentioned Derrida, and I innocently asked, “Who’s that?” He raised his eyebrows: “You... don't know Derrida?” No, jerkface, I wanted to retort, I'm a freshman. Just frickin' tell me already.

After he had finished marveling at my ignorance, he sent me home with a reading list: Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, Deleuze... all the top philosophers, sociologists, literary critics and psychoanalysts who define the field of postmodernism. I suppose I could be accused of being biased against these guys from the get-go, due to my unfortunate introduction to them, but I do think I gave them a fair shake. Only problem was, I couldn't manage to glean any meaning from their writings. To take one representative example from M'sieur Deleuze:

“In the first place, singularities-events correspond to heterogeneous series which are organized into a system which is neither stable nor unstable, but rather ‘metastable,’ endowed with a potential energy wherein the differences between series are distributed ... In the second place, singularities possess a process of auto-unification, always mobile and displaced to the extent that a paradoxical element traverses the series and makes them resonate, enveloping the corresponding singular points in a single aleatory point and all the emissions, all dice throws, in a single cast.”

Everyone around me took such texts very seriously. “But... they're not saying anything!” I would bleat helplessly. No one ever agreed with me, so I kept wondering if I was missing something. Only later did an alternate explanation occur to me: that perhaps the people who agreed with me had all left these sorts of classes for less squishy shores.

That’s what I eventually did too (although you could argue that becoming a statistics major was overcompensating). But it still bothered me that I never found a way to prove that texts like the one above are nonsense. After all, I have to admit that just because I can’t understand a text doesn’t mean it’s meaningless; someone could always insist that I simply haven’t studied that field enough, or that my mental faculties are lacking. And it rankles me to have to essentially leave things at I think you’re wrong, you think I’m wrong; we’ll have to agree to disagree. Because, dammit, I’m right!

I think Richard Dawkins articulated the problem nicely: “No doubt there exist thoughts so profound that most of us will not understand the language in which they are expressed. And no doubt there is also language designed to be unintelligible in order to conceal an absence of honest thought. But how are we to tell the difference?”

Well, I can think of a few approaches. One kind of “test” could operate on the logic that if a field’s experts cannot distinguish between genuine texts in that field and indisputable nonsense, then we must conclude that those texts are equivalent to nonsense. (It’s a little like an inversion of the Turing test, in which the premise is that if we can’t distinguish between a conversation with a computer program and one with a human, then we must conclude that the computer’s intelligence is equivalent to human intelligence.)

That was the logic behind the famous Alan Sokal hoax. Sokal, a physicist at NYU, intentionally wrote a paper consisting of gibberish that mimicked the style and jargon of postmodernism and succeeded in getting it published in a well-regarded pomo journal. However, as much as the hoax delighted me, I'm unwilling to say that what Sokal wrote is indisputably nonsense. He intended it to be nonsense, sure, but someone could always claim that he inadvertently inserted sense into his paper. After all, it’s fairly difficult to write text that has the superficial appearance of meaning without any actual meaning. To be safe, we might need to assume that, as long as a passage is consciously generated, it’s vulnerable to accusations of meaningfulness!

So maybe our faux-pomo writing needs to be unconsciously generated if we’re going to be able to maintain that it’s meaningless. I’m not the first one to come up with this idea: this wonderful “Postmodernism Generator” creates a new essay every time you reload the page, generating text randomly within some parameters of sentence construction and common pomo vocabulary. To my untrained eye, the resulting essays read impressively like the real thing. But still, I’m afraid they might not fool an expert — the non-sequiturs are just a little too glaring.

If it’s too difficult to generate convincing fake texts by starting with meaninglessness, what if we instead started with a real text and then removed some of its meaning? Here’s one way this could work:

“My colleague would open one of Derrida’s works to a random page, pick a random sentence, write it down, and then (above or below it) write a variant in which positive and negative were interchanged, or a word or phrase was replaced with one of opposite meaning. He would then challenge the assembled Derrida partisans to guess which was the original and which was the variant. The point was that Derrida’s admirers are generally unable to distinguish his pronouncements from their opposites at better than chance level, suggesting that the content is a sophisticated form of white noise.”

I like this approach a lot, but it too is not without its problems. How many words would you need to replace? How could you be sure that your negations weren’t canceling each other out? And if your test subjects are pomo experts, how could you be sure they wouldn’t recognize the passage and be able to tell which was the “right” one just from memory?

None of these tests may be airtight, but I really like the theory behind this approach, and I haven’t given up yet! Let me know of any ideas you have for cleanly separating sense from nonsense, and help me retroactively wipe that smug smirk off of Mr. Black Turtleneck’s face.

NEXT: An entirely different approach to pomo-debunking that I’ve been working on, using information-theory. Stay tuned...

74 comments:

Seems to me that any person who claims to understand any such text should be able to explain it, in "plain language", to another person, and have that person understand the explanation.

Of course, the success of such an approach depends on the intellectual qualities of Person B, the receiver of the explanation. But I'm willing to bet that any philosophically inclined person can understand a simplified explanation of most philosophical texts, as long as the texts themselves are meaningful.

Heidegger isn't quite postmodern. But after reading his famous essay on technology, I had some similar thoughts about its intelligibility. It also made Derrida's comment about Heidegger's "privileging of the present participle" a severe, almost silly understatement.

If p entails q then not-q entails not-p. This rather suggests that if a statement means anything (q) then there is some statement somewhere (not-q) that, if true, means that the statement is false.

Now if Derrida-fan cannot tell you what particular statements will falsify a passage we cannot conclude that the passage is meaningless. But we can conclude that Derrida-fan has no idea what it means. If Derrida-fan has no idea what it means then he can have no idea whether it is true or false. If Derrida-fan puts it forward then they put it forward without regard to its truth of falsity: the very definition of Bullshit (Harry G Frankfurt "On Bullshit")

I'm fairly sure that any Kant scholar would be able to say what would falsify a passage of Kant. Thus showing that, although Kant looks like impentrable garbage, it's difficult rather than vacuous writing. Asking "what does it mean?" of a POMO will just get you another string of gobble-de-gook. Ask them what would make it false....

I don't think the rubric 'postmodernism' helps - it might help organize university courses, but not much else. I also find Deleuze intolerably pretentious, but surely it's not fair to lump all of Foucault in that bracket. As for Lacan, there are plenty of people who have done the useful task of trying to explain his version of psychoanalysis in 'plain English',and it's very valuable.Dawkin's 'how can you tell them apart' misses out what I take to be an important process of coming to grips with anything new: it fails to conform to our patterns of comprehension at first, but hardly should be rejected merely for those reasons. This kind of clever skepticism ends up creating one's own air-tight world of common-sense where nothing that doesn't conform to that sense can ever enter.

So the author can't conclusively prove through the non-airtight tests that postmodernism is nonsense, but somehow concludes that it is?

My understanding of the Deleuze's passage is that any single (observed) social event is related to the (unobserved) larger society, which is organized in a social system that is neither stable nor unstable. Language for example is both sticky yet slippery. The meaning of words changes over time (usually long period). But they seem so natural to us as if they have always meant the same i.e. metastable. And these single events do have the potential (energy) to change the society. But the potential of such change is dependent on chance, which takes into consideration the whole aspects of society.

Great post, Julia...the postmodernist turn that has come to dominate the field in which I got my masters--American Studies--was a major reason I switched to history for my PhD. I still come across postmodernist nonsense, but it's usually by literary scholars doing historical work.

Perhaps the most famous and controversial denunciation of postmodernist writing--and, to a degree, the entire post-structuralist approach--is Martha Nussbaum's "Professor of Parody". She critiques Judith Butler's work and argues that beyond being nonsensical and poorly written, Butler's theoretical position (a Foucaultian notion of being embedded in invisible and inescapable structures of power) forecloses any possibility for real change. The article points to the fact that the problem, for post-structuralism at least, goes beyond these writers being obnoxious: they describe problems while suggesting there are few possibilities for change and write in such a way that those seeking change (much less academics) can't understand. That said, I'm not entirely against post-structuralism--like most things, it has its usefulness in moderation. I like theory--but I also hate pretentious bullshit.

The problem with your method is that the essence of postmodernism is (or so I've heard) an understanding that knowledge and meaning are socially constructed and are without inherent meaning. Given this, whose to say that a claim of understanding even the most randomly manufactured passage isn't evidence of postmodernist thinking of the deepest and most profound sort.

"My understanding of the Deleuze's passage is that any single (observed) social event is related to the (unobserved) larger society, which is organized in a social system that is neither stable nor unstable. Language for example is both sticky yet slippery. The meaning of words changes over time (usually long period). But they seem so natural to us as if they have always meant the same i.e. metastable. And these single events do have the potential (energy) to change the society. But the potential of such change is dependent on chance, which takes into consideration the whole aspects of society."

So, Deleuze is saying that society changes over time despite its illusory stability, and that single social events within society can have an effect on the mostly unrecognized whole, but this takes a bit of luck.

Why not just fucking say it, instead of cloaking such a banal observation in needless verbiage?

"The problem with your method is that the essence of postmodernism is (or so I've heard) an understanding that knowledge and meaning are socially constructed and are without inherent meaning. Given this, whose to say that a claim of understanding even the most randomly manufactured passage isn't evidence of postmodernist thinking of the deepest and most profound sort."

You're describing something analogous the self-fulfilling prophecy. If I go around predicting a massive panic, and a massive panic results from the fear I create of a massive panic, even though my "prediction" came true, that doesn't change the fact that I haven't really predicted anything.

Similarly, if I create a new philosophy called It-Means-Whatever-You-Want-ism, and someone interprets something to mean whatever they want it to mean, this might be "evidence" of It-Means-Whatever-You-Want-ism. But that doesn't change the fact that It-Means-Whatever-You-Want-ism is philosophically vacuous sophistry in addition to being completely useless wankery.

"Why not just fucking say it, instead of cloaking such a banal observation in needless verbiage?"

Haha. This is a question I have no answer to as well. But I guess a lot of people write in (different) difficult manner no? So how simple should our writings be? Simple enough for you and I to understand? Simple enough for a primary school kid to understand? What's the standard? Who sets it? Isn't it a little to fascistic to demand one and only one standard? Maybe it's written for other intended audience, and not for you and I. So what gives me the right to go around fucking them for writing so?

My own understanding of these postmodern "banal observations" is that they are implicit calls for tolerance of diversity by highlighting what Chris mentioned as the social construction of knowledge and meanings. Since one cannot claim to absolute truth, one must therefore humble oneself enough to agree to disagree with others.

So yes, you are (have) right. But please don't deny others their rights too. =)

@TonyLloyd: That criterium for meaning ("Can you give an example of evidence that would falsify this statement?") was always very appealing to me, which is why I was drawn to the logical positivists. But apparently people consider it problematic and not as intuitively obvious as it seemed to me, so I reluctantly stopped touting it.

@TonyLloyd: ...Although your falsification test would certainly be effective in the case of Weiye's defense of Deleuze here. A social system that is "neither stable nor unstable"? Language is "both sticky yet slippery"? This kind of argument is as un-falsifiable as it gets. Perhaps not coincidentally, this is the spitting image of the way astrologers talk (e.g., "You are outgoing yet shy at times. You are driven but can lose your focus.")

We make comments about art that can't really be said to be true/false in any clearly verifiable way. Yet we recognize the importance of trying to talk about art intelligently, rationally, and still recognize that a logical positivist version of art criticism is ridiculous. 'Rationalism' is just up for grabs here, as it should be.Hoping there is some middle ground.

I've never read these philosophers but I suspect you are not fair when quoting a random passage from their books and accuse them of writing nonsense.

And I proved it. Just for curiosity I've just retrieved a String theory book from Scribd, opening a random page. It's full not only of mysterious words but there are even weird symbols I've never seen before. Utterly unintelligible.

However I guess somewhere there's an explanation of those words and symbols, and I guess the same goes with these philosophers' books.

yes string theory technical papers are impenetrable to the layperson, but that doesn't put them on the same level as postmodernist writings. For one, I seriously doubt that a postmodernist could pull off a "reverse Sokal" and get a random paper published in a physics journal. I am the editor of a theoretical biology and philosophy journal, and we caught and rejected several nonsensical manuscripts precisely on the basis that we can in fact tell the difference, as the Italians say, between chocolate and shit (though the color is similar...).

As Julia points out, astrology (or theology) can also be framed in obscure language, but that doesn't make them scholarly.

Incidentally, I don't think that *all* postmodern writings are garbage, but they do have a tendency to be more obscure than they need to, and I suspect - as someone pointed out on this thread - that this is because too often what they are trying to say would elicit a loud "duh!" in response, if it were stated in plain English (or French).

The paradox of postmodernism is that if knowledge is socially constructed, then the knowledge that knowledge is socially constructed is also just as constructed. In that sense, Deleuze's arguments and mine are just as (un)limited and (un)falsifiable, which is why I have to admit that it is a condition that drives me crazy at times, perhaps not unlike Nietzsche's attempt to moralize and transcend nihilism before he broke down (or he finally accepted nihilism)?

"However I guess somewhere there's an explanation of those words and symbols, and I guess the same goes with these philosophers' books."

Yes, there is a philosophy behind the philosophy. One of my postmodernist professors, has complained of elitism within the philosophical 'community.' He blieves analytic philosophers are overly dismissive.

Yet I still think Julia has a point. I cannot personally comment on Derrida et al but per Heidegger again, he used metaphor a great deal. So there is an ambiguity to what he's written.

And yet, I'm not sure why the attack on post-modernism is necessary. Who is post-modernism threatening?

It seems to me post-modernism is just another part of the conversation of human knowledge (especially useful in the creative arts).

If you don't think post-modern academic theorists have anything to say worth hearing, you can choose to ignore or argue against their points. But to call it nonsense makes the accuser seem unwilling to grapple with what post-modernism is trying to do, instead of what the accuser thinks it should be doing...

(Funny, after a recent post accused journalists of intellectual laziness for not understanding science...)

first off, post-modernism does have consequences. That sort of "thinking" has percolated in various sectors of society (see the many NYT editorials by Stanley Fish that I have criticized on this blog), and has even shaped the thinking of some politicians (it has been used by creationists to attack science as "just another power structure"). Words and thoughts matter.

Second, there is a distinction between keeping an open mind on something you disagree while engaging in a fruitful discussion on the one hand, and calling nonsense when we see it on the other hand. I think creationism is nonsense, and I don't engage it on the same level as I engage string theory...

Well, Joshua, there are plenty of practical reasons why I think we should challenge postmodernism, *if* we suspect it to be partly or largely nonsense: it's wasting the time, money, and energy of many bright people who could otherwise be studying/doing something more worthwhile.

But aside from those practical considerations, the health of intellectual culture absolutely depends on us not letting people get away with BS. We have to insist that people think and speak clearly and be able to defend their arguments, or what's the point of discourse? Just to enjoy the sound of our own voices using big words?

Joshua - It's not a question of arguing against their points until we can be sure that they're making any points at all in that language of theirs!

It's a question of whether postmodernists have any particular expertise and knowledge (beyond the knowledge of how to obscure ignorance in complex language). If so, they have something worth listening to. If not, they're taking countless amounts of time and money from people (including us). We don't know which it is - they claim to have some knowledge but we think it's a huge con job.

You say we should be grappling with what postmodernism is TRYING to do - what is that, exactly? I had been assuming that it was trying to convey an intended meaning. Our goal is to see how it's doing at that - by finding out whether postmodern texts have any more meaning than we would expect in random texts of that style.

This discussion and post reminds me of comments by the late great Norman Levitt in his review of Steve Fuller's book, Science v. Religion, titled (a great one here): The Painful Elaboration of the Fatuous [SKEPTIC Magazine Vol.14 No.1 2008]. It also reminds me of my brain beating exercise in figuring out the Chalmers survey posted in Massimo's Pick's post.

Here's some quotes I'd like to share: [I have to type this out, so excuse any mistakes]

~ Norman Levitt: ~ "Now I would like to consider the question of whether Fuller's ideological flight into the embrace of the theocratic right bespeaks a wider tendency within the postmodern academy to trade its vaunted left-radicalism for the honor of riding shotgun on behalf of the new breed of creationist theocrats.[snip]

The wider lesson, if there be any, is that animosity to science as such and its cognitive authority still pervades academic life outside the domain of the science faculty. The compost that nurtured Steve Fuller and many of his associates in their development of "social constructivist" theory consisted principally of these doubts, resentments and antagonisms. This soil put forth a host of noxious weeds, quite varied, and sometimes taxonomically linked only by the common bitterness they exuded. Each in its own way - literary theory, cultural studies, ethnic studies, and a long standing Marxisant approach to sociology - joined the tacit alliance of antiscientific intellectuals whose imprecations grew all the louder even as their influence over the practice of science and public science policy shrank to imperceptibility.

The anti-science of the contemporary academy is a late and petulant echo of Spiritualism, Anthroposophy, Theosophy, Forteanism, and a dozen other cults that once appealed to the culturally fashionable." ~ [end]

I recommend a full reading of Norman's piece.

I would also recommend a reading of E.O. Wilson's take on postmodernism in his book, Consilience. In a favorable light we can see the movement as had (no longer really) a positive effect on science in that it forced science to defend itself in a cultural debate, that appears to be still raging. This also reminds me of how folks like Penrose and Dennett actually had to sharpen their arguments in light of Chalmers' claims, which ended up providing a great service to the understanding of science and philosophy.

I agree that words and thoughts matter. I also agree that creationism is ridiculous. That being said, you're free to criticize people using post-modern theory all you want. But to criticize a tool of argument because you think it's a dangerous tool is something I am not interested in. People are allowed to be wrong.

That doesn't excuse them when they are wrong. But we don't make progress by claiming only that we know what we know and that's all we can know.

(Some people would even claim that all thinking is analogical, and all learning is through trying to know things we don't already know--that we reason from what we knew before and move forward.)

As for the comment that because you don't understand what someone says it needs to be said more clearly, there are some arguments and ideas that even when broken down to their simplest value is still only worthwhile as part of a dialogue between people within that discipline (as there are some science and math problems that even scientists and mathematicians don't agree on).

Or, to be more clear: some scientists have a vocabulary that I don't, and can have more fun with scientific language than I can.

So Massimo, if it is not an argument about people having the right to be wrong, and it is an argument that you should fight the words for their consequences, I have no idea what the difference is that you are making between those two.

Some words are wrong, sure, but a theory is merely an organizing principle for some people who use some of their words, the theory is not the words themselves...

And yet, I'm not sure why the attack on post-modernism is necessary. Who is post-modernism threatening?

Julia seems to have been motivated to write this because of observations: waste of educational resources and students' time she experienced in her own career, and the way it befuddles the minds of certain people she met.

The latter is also what annoys me about post-modernism, or perhaps I should rather say about people who have been influenced by it and may only believe that they understood what it is about. I have met persons who have become convinced, through exposure to this "philosophy" in their studies, that all science and knowledge is merely ideology and discourse. Now it may be that this is a misunderstanding of post-modernism, and that would be an interesting discussion, but one of the points raised here is the fact that post-modernism may be vacuous and that's it.

Anyway, this impact it has on people I met has several regrettable consequences. For starters, you can completely forget the idea of having a fruitful conversation with these people. You cannot decide, elucidate, argue, understand, learn, because they will just sit there smiling serenely, proud of their own cleverness and sophistication, and maintain that it is all opinion anyway. The real danger lies in politics, of course, as others above have already indicated. If you are honestly convinced that there is no right or wrong, no fact or currently objectively best explanation to be found in a discussion such as the one on climate change, it is all just an ideology-driven discourse where we cannot ever be sure of anything anyway, then this can have serious impacts on how people deal with the world around them. And in contrast to the wishful thinking some people indulge in, the world does come back to bite them sometimes.

The main response I have for the commenters who say they DO find meaning in postmodernism* is this: People are really good at reading their own meaning into cryptic nonsense. I'm not claiming that that's ALL that's going on, but if I had to guess I would say that there is a vague, usually banal point at the core of a typical pomo text, surrounded by a cloud of jargon and obfuscation. Then a sympathetic reader expecting to find meaning will pick up on that little nubbin of an original point, and inadvertently flesh it out into something more complex and less banal, all on his own. Which is why you get so many people who insist they find meaning in postmodernism, but there doesn't seem to be a lot of agreement on what, precisely, postmodernist authors are arguing (beyond that simple nubbin).

This relates to another interesting potential meaning-test. My original idea for testing whether meaning had been communicated (vs. whether readers were just inferring their own meaning from nonsense) was to test whether the author's intended meaning had any relation to the reader's derived meaning. But then it occurred to me that another important test is: When multiple experts read the same passage, do they independently derive the same meaning from it? Or at least a very similar meaning? I'm not sure exactly how to test this rigorously, but it does seem like an important measure of the clarity of communication in a field overall.

*(I'll totally concede that the guys I'm picking on don't constitute the entirety of the field of postmodernism; I'll also agree that the term "postmodernism" is a kind of sloppy, shorthand way to group them. But regardless of what name you want to give these people, the relevant fact is that they are influential, and therefore worth calling on their BS.)

Pardon me while I quote others (again - personally I have little to add).

However, Julia's last comment brought something else to mind. It was an interview with Michael Shermer and the discussion turned to postmodernism.

~ Shermer ~ "As Richard [Dawkins] likes to say, show me a postmodernist philosopher at 30,000 feet and I’ll show you a hypocrite.[snip]

What that hoax [Alan Sokal] also told us is that you can actually just B.S. people with scientific language without bothering to use the scientific process. That is what we ultimately mean by “pseudo-science.” It isn’t just whatever you or I or some committee thinks is not science. Pseudo-science is the intentional misuse of scientific jargon in order to portray oneself as having some scientific perspective or taking a scientific approach. The reason we find a lot of practitioners of pseudo-science is because we live in the age of science, and so people realize—particularly on the margins—that to be taken seriously, they at least have to appear scientific." ~ [end]

Oh, and to Julia on 'cryptic nonsense'. There is surely a difference between nonsense (ga ga ga) and riddles. One way of thinking of Socrates is that he peddled a series of philosophical riddles that people thought were nonsense (no one does wrong willingly, it is better to suffer evil than do it), but was committed rationally to working through their implications. So it wasn't simply 'sense versus nonsense', but riddles that shook up common sense but also provoked shared rational inquiry.

So I'm with you that nonsense needs to be debunked (and agree that a lot of what you label postmodernism might be just that), but think that a lot of provocative interesting ideas lie there too, and they function (if you let them) much as Socrates' riddles. And yes, people can read into cryptic sentences what they want - but that isn't necessarily a bad thing. It might be a way of meaningful self-exploration.

"How about: As simple as possible while still conveying the author's argument? That seems like a pretty reasonable, un-fascist standard to me."

Isn't this about as obscure as the postmodernist writings that you criticize? It lacks an objective measurement no? Come on. I'm sure you can do better as a statistic major (just kidding). =)

An accomplished pianist may find Fantasie Impromptu very simple to perform let alone play. Perhaps that's just the simplest way these postmodernists can convey their message? I don't know. I hate reading some of them too. But I don't dismiss them just because they are difficult to read. I dismiss them based on the same set of logic you purport to promote when.

On a personal note, I am really interested in statistics too. Maybe we can discuss more about it later. =)

The issue of truth is something that many philosophers (and postmodernists too) disagree with one another. For myself, I am about as unconvinced as many of you to the claim that there is really no right or wrong. But as of now, I am convinced from what I've read that human beings are unable to arrive at absolute truths yet. And that I believe is the value of postmodernism, in that it highlights the assumptions of logical empiricism. Foucault for example does a great job on the observations of homosexuality, knowledge and power, etc, and Derrida with the science of science argument. And I believe it does no help to merely dismiss them for being impenetrable (although I do wish sometimes that they can be more accessible). And from then on, we work together to come out with something even better? Isn't that what science is really about?

One quibble, when you say: "But as of now, I am convinced from what I've read that human beings are unable to arrive at absolute truths yet. And that I believe is the value of postmodernism, in that it highlights the assumptions of logical empiricism."

My reply is that we don't need postmodernism in any way for this activity. Scientific truths are recognized as provisional truths already. That is already part of the scientific process, no postmodernism required.

For me these discussions and debates once again point out the importance of Philosophers to better understand science and vise-versa. Especially given that they are applied broadly within society.

I tend to disagree *slightly* with *part* of Massimo's arguments on the science and skepticism front. For example I think he is mistaken in his argument on the limits of skepticism as applied to politics/economics via Shermer's position (even though I disagree in part with Shermer's, Libertarianism). How would he view David S. Wilson's evolutionary arguments on economics? I think D.S. Wilson, Dennett and E.O. Wilson are correct that a "concilient" type effort is needed across domains. With that comes a potentially large area for skepticism.

I also disagree in part with lumping E.O. Wilson onto the scientism pile because of his "Consilience" effort. I think an important aspect to keep in mind is that E.O. was not hesitant in pointing out the influences of "postmodernistic" type argument within the evolutionary sciences. In this regard he openly took Lewontin and Gould to task for applying the leftist Marxist ideology to their scientific interpretations on certain levels and warned of its influence (another example of my concern of how we apply levels of significance to concerns over reputations and tactics of the opposition).

Exactly Luke! Unfortunately, many people still misuse statistical significance as absolute truth. There are always limitations. But somehow saying it so simply doesn't seem to register its significance in many people.

I fully agree with your point on the relationship between science and skepticism. =)

But what's most interesting to me about the difference between attack and counter-attack here is that the attack seems unscientific and not logically argued. A few anecdotal claims are made: A TA was a jerk, Alan Sokal fooled one dumb literary journal, and Derrida and Deleuze can be obfuscatory. And yet, each of these individual incidents or persons are used to debunk an entire method.

Here are the claims made:

Claim 1: All the people in Julia's classes who would have found philosophy obfuscatory (since the rest weren't complaining) must have already left the study of philosophy (if not for statistics, perhaps for chemistry or fiction or mathematics).

Claim 2: Dawkins must be correct that not only is there language designed to be unintelligible to conceal the absence of an honest thought, but also that language should never be used to demonstrate the obfuscation of language itself. (I would argue that all language is analogy, and analogy is never perfect. Yes, one reason we strive (strive!) for clarity.)

Claim 3: Sokal hoaxed one well-regarded pomo literary journal--therefore all of post-modernism is useless. A subset of this claim is that Sokal may have accidentally created meaningful language--or language with any value in it (surely all language has value in it, but that is a claim for another time).

Claim 4: Here are some tests that could work. But no one has taken the time to do them and put them up on this blog. Even if they did, though, here's one problem I have with that claim: If language is analogy, and meaning must be intentional, then is there a difference between meaningful unintelligibility and intentional meaninglessness?

Claim 5 (in the comments section): We must speak clearly if we can. My question is: Why? Why must we speak clearly? Personally, I think much is learned by trying to understand what we don't necessarily understand, even if it is somewhat obfuscatory.

(Continued from above. Although, Luke, I might add. Do we really need to "need post-modernism?")

Now, there are a lot of claims above (and all of them under the master claim that post-modernist theory is provably nonsense). But the unspoken part is the assumption that a proof itself is necessarily airtight. With the right assumptions, anything can be proved, can it not? Now, the assumptions may be wrong, depending on the assumptions. Can the assumptions also be wrong based on the intention behind them? Perhaps with language, when words come already with multiple meanings, intention matters in a way that intention does not matter in mathematics (language even derived out of combining words to make new meanings, for ex. whale-road meaning ocean, in English).

You know, the funny thing is, I'm not even a post-modernist. But you know what? This kind of smug back-patting on the part of the people claiming that post-modernists must be too dumb to realize that they're practicing non-sense (I believe that is an accurate paraphrase of some of the claims made in the comments section) is just as infuriating as that TA who was a real jerk to Julia.

The thing is, I don't pretend to have much of an education or training in post-modern theory, and my assumption is that with more training I would be better able to engage with post-modernist theory (what I've read and discussed I've enjoyed).

So perhaps "people are really good at reading their own meaning into cryptic nonsense," Julia. And perhaps that meaning is also worthless, as I am inferring from your claim. Perhaps assuming that all meaning is constructed is not a great advance in philosophy (nor a single truth that denies any differences in construction of meaning that we can make--personally I prefer that we choose certain meanings, and laws, etc. because it's better for us if we do. The same way an atheist can be/are already moral, despite the claims of some bat-wing religious folks).

So a reasonable discussion might continue to be useful here--but the accusations that all people using post-modernism as a tool are either fools or charlatans will convince only those who were already convinced, and not those of us who expect argument and reason, not mere appeals to authority, such as Dawkins and Sokal, the easiest kind of rhetoric, and not mere ad homonym attacks.

Nice insights, very clear. However, as you may expect I gots me some nits to pick.

~ "A subset of this claim is that Sokal may have accidentally created meaningful language--or language with any value in it."

Though potentially true, it is non-the-less false. It is pretty well crafted and has yet to show any potential of containing significant meaning on any useful level. It may not be wise to broad-brush using Sokal's Hoax, however there are indeed lessons to be taken from the exercise that we would be unwise to not recognize.

~ "This kind of smug back-patting on the part of the people claiming that post-modernists must be too dumb to realize that they're practicing non-sense."

Actually, there are others ways to view this and I think the quote I provided by M. Shermer in an above post illustrates this fact. Although, its very possible that because of domain specificity that like Chalmers offers as a potential explanation for his survey findings amongst specialist in Philosophy [see: Massimo's Pick's] there may be "judgments corrupted by an insider literature". This is basically the point Norman Levitt is making also.

And until the cracks are widened I don't see any breakthroughs on the horizon - we may be left with a kind of self-sealed environment hemmed in by its own self-perpetuating nonsense. This doesn't have to be a one sided deal either, across domain benefits are potentially real.

However, like you - I'm no expert here, and that's the understatement of the day :)

As Tony Loyd approached above and I'll take a step further. Run it through the rigor of Formal Mathematical Logic. The use of the converse (which he outlined) is useful. However, the converse and initial premise don't necessarily need to be equal, thus one can be true while the other is false.

I'm an applied mathematics major and as far as I know that stuff is nearly indomitable once proven. At least that's what I've come to understand, under what little I've been exposed to thus far. A LOT more to come for me...

Could someone tell me what the postmodernists are trying to do? What are they trying to say (e.g. the quote in the main post)?

This relates to another interesting potential meaning-test. My original idea for testing whether meaning had been communicated (vs. whether readers were just inferring their own meaning from nonsense) was to test whether the author's intended meaning had any relation to the reader's derived meaning. But then it occurred to me that another important test is: When multiple experts read the same passage, do they independently derive the same meaning from it? Or at least a very similar meaning? I'm not sure exactly how to test this rigorously, but it does seem like an important measure of the clarity of communication in a field overall.

Julia, in any field of science, the scientists within that field will themselves gladly submit to a test about meaning in this way. In fact, they'll gladly come up with such a test themselves, I posit. Question is, will the postmodernists? If not, then I suspect they know that there is no meaning beyond "their own meaning into cryptic nonsense."

Claim 5 (in the comments section): We must speak clearly if we can. My question is: Why? Why must we speak clearly? Personally, I think much is learned by trying to understand what we don't necessarily understand, even if it is somewhat obfuscatory.

Jason, this has got to be the thickest. Are you kidding? Why we must speak clearly: to convey meaning. "Much is learned..." about what? About how the author has trouble articulating his insight? Seriously!

The thing is, I don't pretend to have much of an education or training in post-modern theory

This kind of smug back-patting on the part of the people claiming that post-modernists must be too dumb to realize that they're practicing non-sense

Well, my beef would mostly be with people who may not even have understood the philosophy, or with those who only pretend to have (see above).

However, sometimes there are people practising demonstrable nonsense - all organized religions come to mind, somehow -, and pointing out that they are either too dumb to realize this or else charlatans is exactly as much smug back-patting as saying that ice is frozen water.

Once more however, however, as far as I understand it we are still searching for a way to decide whether postmodernism is nonsense - that is what the post was about.

I find the tone of the original post and many of the comments annoying; the claims about “postmodernism” in general seem aimed at too large a target. And I don’t think it helps to say “oh, and we know that postmodernism is a vague term and that what we’re referring to is a wide variety of different people and disciplines.”

So, with Iacanmark, I want to note that much of Foucault’s writing is both comprehensible and makes non-trivial claims; his History of Sexuality volume 2 is a particularly striking piece of work. Although there are legitimate questions about just how “original” his claims in that book are, there is no doubt that it was his work that brought those claims to prominence in a broader intellectual community. Now, you may not agree with his claims, but it is clear what they are, what his evidence in favor of them is, and what would show him to be wrong. Halperin extends this work, in a (somewhat) easier to understand language. Now, I *hate* Foucault’s writing style, and I *hate* Judith Butler’s writing style (oddly, in Butler’s case, she is vastly more comprehensible in person, and able to explain her work relatively clearly – I wish she had an editor that made her write like she talks!), but I willing to put up with them at least long enough to read their work enough to get the main points...

Now, I am not suggesting that there isn’t a lot of absolute bullshit published under the broad label “postmodernism” – and given how badly written (by my standards as an analytic philosopher) many of the ‘key texts’ in the field are, I also agree that it is harder than it ought to be to tell the crap from the good bits. But what I find frustrating is the tendency I see in the comments and the original post to label as “postmodern” any relatively recent work that the author find impenetrable or more broadly wrong. So, for example, post-modernism is *not* the same thing as social construction – so, pace Massimo, Ian Hacking’s “The Social Construction of What” is *not* “a serious and balanced analysis of postmodernism” – it is a serious and balanced analysis of arguments surrounding claims regarding “social construction” in a number of domains. Likewise, it makes sense to ask if e.g. the so-called “strong sociology of science” program is an example of post-modernism? I think such a claim would be misguided; I think that many of the claims that emerge from the strong sociology of science program are wrong, but it doesn’t seem part of the “post-modern” project, except insofar as “modernism” might imply a sort of realism, and hence any anti-realists (at least of a certain sort) are at least “not-modernists.”

It is worth recalling that contemporary “post-modernism” got its start in architecture, at least in part as a response to the perceived - and I think quite real - failures of “modernist” architecture. The excesses (and failures) of post-modern architecture are no less real, but they are different from the claim that a particular set of sociologists, philosophers, and literary theorists are mostly talking nonsense. And the claims of self-identified post-modern literary theorists, self-identified post-modern sociologists, self-identified post-modern philosophers, and self-identified post-modern legal scholars (to name a few areas) are, in many ways, equally different responses to perceived failures within those different fields.

So before claiming that “post-modernism” is bullshit, it is worth paying some attention to the different fields in which it makes an appearance, and the different claims being made. I have no doubt that there is a bunch of crap out there peddled under the name “post-modernism,” nor do I doubt that some authors have used impenetrable language as an excuse for not thinking clearly. But let’s not use the excesses of the field as an excuse for not thinking clearly ourselves, OK?

The great irony of this post is that it--like the text of the Sokal Hoax-- is itself a mishmash of copied-and-pasted critiques, none of which is particularly helpful or salient.

The Dawkins quote, the Derrida quote out of context, the Sokal Hoax, the argument from "I don't get it!", the Postmodernism Generator, the promissory note about a future "anti-pomo" approach, it's like every theme from every anti-pomo piece ever written by a mainly clueless undergrad mashed into one long rant. Is Ms. Galef engaging in subtle irony?

I doubt it. I mean, we all know that Derrida is a bastard. Deleuze and Lacan are quite difficult in places. Foucault, on the other hand, has written several acessible and interesting books using his genealogical method.

Analytic philosophy, by comparison, is often utterly unintelligible to non-specialists, sometimes just simply difficult, and occasionally easily accessible.

Soooo... what's the problem, again? I'm having a hard time seeing why this, like every other such piece, isn't just a desperate attempt at self-promotion via the demonizing of "them" and the lionizing of "us".

I'm doubting if I dare step into this debate now that it's piled so high, but...

One fundamental question behind what post-structuralist writers want is just how much do they want to be understood? How much information does a post-structuralist writer hope to disseminate, and why? If they're only writing for their initiated clique/claque/club, and they don't intend for that knowledge (such as it is) to be usefully or productively read by anyone else outside that specialized discourse, so be it. But even specialist doctors work to translate a complicated diagnosis into language the receiver of that diagnosis can understand.

The problem, it seems, is that many of the suggested claims made by writers like Deleuze, Butler, Bhaba, etc., are about history, literature, art, and more broadly justice and human rights, and finally about our access to knowledge itself. Their critiques are meant to be socially transformative. Unfortunately, they'd first need to be comprehended. I've used random passages from Bhaba in the past as negative examples of academic writing, 14-line-long paragraphs consisting of two sentences, each with multiple grammatical subjects that aren't clearly connected to any of the manifold predicates peppering the graph.

This is a problem. As was stated above, the slipperiness of post-structuralist pronouncements that something like truth is entirely socially constructed opens academia to attacks while those same attackers use the same kinds of slippery approaches to argue things like global warming is a conspiracy, there's a war on Christmas, we've become a socialist communist fascist state, it's always better to defer rights to private entities rather than an accountable government, and freedom is synonymous with Christianity. And such attacks, like the post-modern models, are often made either without the burden of evidence, or scanty evidence that raises more questions than it answers. In effect, such slippery post-structuralist approaches that make claims for progressive political action leave themselves both unable to take any such action while giving their opponents the tools to undermine their own post-structuralist positions.

Not every post-structuralist is necessarily opaque and difficult. With plenty of post-its and diagrams, Lacan can eventually be cracked. Rorty was never all that difficult. And I'll agree that Foucault can certainly be more lucid than Laclau. But it's always bothered me that writers claiming to make pronouncements about social transformation refuse to do so in language that could be understood by the very people they propose to stand with -- the poor, the uneducated, the disenfranchised and dispossessed. How are such people even supposed to have access to their ground-breaking ideas, let alone put them into some sort of practice? (Again, Rorty was very good and making clear pronouncements about such things, and he was lecturing on the links between his philosophy and politics right up to his death in a way that people off the street could walk in and get -- at least they did where I'm at.)

Part of the problem may stem from the claim made above (by Weiye, I believe) that A.) All knowledge is a discourse, and B) Every discourse is socially constructed, therefore C.) Even the knowledge that all knowledge is a socially-constructed discourse is itself a socially-constructed discourse. It's smacks of throwing up your hands and declaring that all language is just a system of mirrors facing mirrors, so no meaning is ever ultimately attainable, and the very act of trying to discern something like philosophical truth is a fallacy. Hence much post-structuralist writing tried to present itself as literature that demonstrated this state; not philosophy as literature, like Camus' The Stranger, but philosophical arguments written through the techniques of literature. (It's also one of the reasosn Derrida wouldn't write about Sam Beckett -- he said Beckett was too close to what Derrida was doing, and Beckett arguably conveyed his meanings more clearly.)

But that position rests on the shaky assumption that all knowledge consists of socially-constructed discourses. That's an assumption worth challenging. First I think we can all agree that knowledge is transmitted and understood in packets of language -- whether spoken or written dialects, mathematics, symbols or even musical notation, language is the key medium for knowledge. Many working in psychology and linguistics today would argue that language is not entirely socially-constructed; we're born with certain syntactical and grammatical elements hardwired into our heads. And that's not just a human thing, it's an animal thing; even dogs have a huge variety of sounds they make that contain content and convey specific messages (I played balcony ball with my beagle a while ago and heard all kinds of consistent, repeatable sounds that each conveyed a certain meaning about where the sqeaky toy was). Even feral children raised by animals learn to communicate with those animals in ways non-feral people don't get; you could argue that the feral kid's animal discourse was socially constructed in that animal pack, but the feral kid was born with the capacity to recognize and categorize sounds and gestures into some kind of syntactical and grammatical content.

So if knowledge itself isn't entirely socially constructed, then the assumption that we can never really move beyond the loop of language doesn't really hold. That's arguably where the broader social and lately theological claims made by post-structuralist writers become more troubling and unsatisfying: hipsters may dig Zizek's crypto-Stalinist claims that the Real we desire is an authoritarian to validate our democratic pronouncements, St. Paul understood this more than anyone, and real/Real social transformation will come from slums. But show me the founding father of the favelas who's keeping up with Zizek's firehose-rate of publishing, let alone has the education to get that half the time Zizek's playing out a Lacanian game of leaving the reader unsatisfied to model the structure of desire. (When Zizek wants to, he can write clearly.) The turn to theological questions by writers like Rene Girdard, Terry Eagleton, Giorgio Agamben, the later Derrida, etc. also in part seems to be where you go when you accept that nothing can be understood outside of socially-constructed discourses; therefore the socially-constructed discourse writ large becomes a kind of stand-in for the notion of a hermetically-honed theology. Language becomes lord.

There was a comment above about how we make comments about art that may not be true or false in any verifiable way. The comment wasn't fleshed out, but I got the sense from that and other comments that one underlying argument is that post-structuralist thought is productive for critiqueing the arts. I don't think that's quite right; when we're talking about professional academics, they don't make comments about art, they publish claims about art, and are expected to back those claims up. If the claims are found to be wanting or false, then it's the job of other academics to respond and explain why the claims are false, or they may be true but not in the way the original writer meant. However, if the discourse used to make such claims is impenetrable and always shielded by the language-loop defense, we don't really get anywhere. That said, a good deal of art -- visual, literary, etc. -- has been made by playing with these idea. I mentioned Beckett above, and James Joyce consciously made a career out of it; he bragged about how he was going to keep critics busy for decades (yet he embedded plenty of keys to his locked doors).

But in the end, it seems that a lot of this problem comes down to whether one accepts that knowledge is an entirely socially-constructed discourse and dives into that deep end, or doesn't and looks for harder stuff upon which to base one's arguments. Besides, when you take the time to re-write and analyze each line of Grammatology or The Prison House of Language or The Medium Is the Message, I've found that most people can sum up the key points in much clearer terms, and often what they find is that the ideas are not all that new, they're just newly-dressed.

Insightful posts. =) The point on self-defeating is correct although I must add that if anything, many post-structuralist writers like Spivak (I hate her writing style too) advocate self-reflexivity in hope of transcending this predicament.

There's something about feral children that privileged them with communication skills beyond non-feral people. So knowledge itself isn't entirely constructed, but which part is it? We all need to start somewhere when we make a certain claim don't we? Is it because I think, therefore I am? Or am I privileging the mind over the body? And I do believe (and hope that) that we can move beyond the loop. But as of now, I accept my limits the way Heidegger accepted his in his ontic quest. =)

And I agree that most of the stuff are just canonical, but isn't philosophy canonical to a certain extent?

On another note, you've reminded me of the quarrel between philosophy and poetry. Hmm...

On the question of where knowing begins, I think Lacan can be useful here -- the mirror stage. There's a stage in the development of the mammalian brain where the subject (baby, puppy, cub, kitten, etc.) recognizes the others around recognizing her.

(I believe the stage occurs around three or four months old with children, don't quote me on that).

So if you're the baby, when you hit the mirror stage, instead of your mother just being an extension of your own self, you start to recognize that your mother is in turn recognizing you. That leads to the recognition of yourself as a subject outside of or beyond your mother, and everything else, and then youu're becoming individuated -- becoming an individual. The world at that point splits from being all an extension of the self into a series of binary splits: me/mom; mom/dad; dog/stuffed toy dog; etc. The baby at that point, or the baby's mind, becomes a categorizing machine. Gestures and sounds also appear at this stage, as the baby is trying to signify that an object outside herself has some sort of presence in the world.

(It's one of the reasons so many people are teaching their babies sign language along with other languages; they're brains are just primed to absorb all that information. A three-year-old buddy of mine still can't say "please" without scratching his ribs.)

So what we can tell is that right around this stage, and probably up to about age four or five, those structures that allow for the categorization of knowledge and its signification through sounds and gestures are working in overdrive. This happens to different degrees in different mammals, and lasts longest with primates. (I don't know how long that stage would last with cetaceans like dolphins and whales, but there have been recorded instances of interspecies communication between bottlenose dolphins and pygmy sperm whales in New Zealand).

Social construction comes into play when it comes to particular languages, dialects, grunts and growls, etc. that the baby is then immersed in; after all, babies born in Iceland don't just start speaking Croatian, but they do just start speaking. The social construction is arguably software layered above the stuff hardwired into our wetware; the brain develops into a structure that receives language, just like a cup can receive liquid, but what that liquid will be (coffee, tea, whiskey, water) is up for grabs -- socially constructed. From that standpoint, it's arguable that one can take a socially-constructed discourse and drill down to see how it reacts with and upon the already-extant hardware. Linguists like George Lakoff have been looking into this with regard to politics; the psych dept. at the U. of Wisconsin has measured how things like prayer and meditation -- different internal linguistic manifestations -- affect brain activity. A retired psychoanalyst from my U. named Vamik Volkan focused on how a discourse could affect large-group psychology, particularly how they can trigger political actions and reactions. If the brain wasn't structured in the way it is, syntax and grammar wouldn't have the same repeatable effects in people. In the end, it suggests to me that there knowledge isn't necessarily just a socially constructed discourse, but is rather a function of certain social discourses and events overlayed upon certain biological structures. In that way, social construction is rather like the cascading style sheet that determines the way a web page looks; the underlying code is more or less stable, but its appearance is far more malleable and I guess "slippery."

You might be right about that. My question though: why do we privilege in the arts that certain directors, musicians, poets, painters, etc. are recognized within their disciplines as great talents without being popularly accepted? It’s not a matter of only the insiders being smart enough or talented enough to “get it,” as much as that there is a limited dialogue that is being entered into. Some painters are fascinated by someone masterfully exploring the color blue, for instance, whereas you or I might not be.

Mintman, who is pretending to understand post-modernism? You seem to be trying to understand something that does not exist—and post-modernism is too “large a target” as Jonathon put it, for it to be realistically debated—and it’s the rest of us who are trying to find points or assumptions we can actually talk about. But keep pretending that there is such a single thing as post-modernism, buddy.

J, you make the point that some claims by post-modernists are not new, but only newly dressed. But what knowledge is truly “new”? Form and function are uniquely entwined, and looking at old thoughts in new ways can be quite useful/generative. As Ezra Pound put it, in his cantos, “Make it new.” What some critics don’t realize is he is referring to the wheat crops, and the seasons. Everything that is old is made new again…

Bjorn, First off, my name is Josh, not Jason. Clearly you weren’t patient enough in your reading to even get my name right.

Second, you claim that we must be clear to convey meaning. I disagree. Meaning is not only conveyed through clarity. Or are you also against abstract art?

Even if we’re just talking about the act/event of learning, then yes, perfect meaningfulness is not necessary for learning. Pedagogical research suggests that most students learn not from perfectly clear teachers vomiting insight into their mouths, but rather through their own struggles to make sense of new texts that are above their heads (it’s called learning new things--not learning old, simple things).

And even if perfect clarity is necessary (by your standards, not mine), why not also attack analytical philosophy, which is dreadfully unclear? Or quantum physics? Or experimental mathematics?

On an entirely comical note: your misreading of the comment below is fascinating.

I admitted: The thing is, I don't pretend to have much of an education or training in post-modern theory .

You insulted: Your talent is by birth, then.

No, actually, unlike you I wasn’t making any claims of talent or knowledge. I was merely participating in the dialogue. Do you have anything useful to contribute, Bjorn? Any evidence? Or only mere claims and insults?

No, actually, unlike you I wasn’t making any claims of talent or knowledge. I was merely participating in the dialogue. Do you have anything useful to contribute, Bjorn? Any evidence? Or only mere claims and insults?

Hey, it was a joke. Jebus, calm down already.

Second, you claim that we must be clear to convey meaning. I disagree. Meaning is not only conveyed through clarity. Or are you also against abstract art?

I am not against art or poetry. If that's what pomo is (and I don't know if it is) then clarity is indeed not necessarily something to strive for.

And even if perfect clarity is necessary (by your standards, not mine), why not also attack analytical philosophy, which is dreadfully unclear? Or quantum physics? Or experimental mathematics?

I do not say that "perfect clarity" is necessary - just that the clearer we write, the more people will understand (and that's a good thing concerning science and philosophy, but maybe not art).

I have no problem with anyone "attacking" anyone else for not writing clearly; I think that is always healthy. I, as you recall, didn't write the main post.

P.S. My name is Bjørn. If you are using a Mac you can type ø by [alt/option o]. If not, you can use copy and paste.

J, you wrote (and I forgot to respond to), a comment about how we talk about art:

"There was a comment above about how we make comments about art that may not be true or false in any verifiable way...I don't think that's quite right; when we're talking about professional academics, they don't make comments about art, they publish claims about art, and are expected to back those claims up. If the claims are found to be wanting or false, then it's the job of other academics to respond and explain why the claims are false, or they may be true but not in the way the original writer meant. However, if the discourse used to make such claims is impenetrable and always shielded by the language-loop defense, we don't really get anywhere."

I'm mostly in agreement with you, except for the truth/falsity language you use. Academics make claims that are either more or less defensible, and they certainly should have evidence to back those claims up. (Hopefully the claims are also interesting and thought-provoking enough to be worth defending, otherwise why make them?)

However, when we talk about art, which is in constant dialogue between author and audience, there is no truth/falsity (my claim, obviously not fact or anything, but you know, onward). Even if the author thinks he/she intended one reading of his/her work, other readings might be more interesting or valid. So while it would be good for people to make claims more clearly, claiming that we can speak truthfully about these claims is generous on our parts, or at worst, naive.

Still, I ama greed with you about Beckett and Joyce, and there are significant differences in post-modern criticism and post-modern art.

*sorry -- I have some trouble with my hands, and keep finding screwy typing mistakes, so I'm deleting and reposting*

I'm taking these comments/responses one by one as I read them:

Joshua, as far as talented artists that aren't popularly recognized, might want to check out David Markson -- he's a writer's writer who doesn't seem to ever experience the same kind of recognition that writers who look up to him receive. One of this books, This Is Not a Novel is comprised of a series of aphorisms that, but about page 30 or so, starts to take on a recognizable narrative pattern. It's an anti-novel that still fulfills many of the requirements of the novel, and teases Harold Bloom ruthlessly throughout. (He has Bloom in a sideshow reading 1000 pages an hour.)

What I found interesting about that book is that it critiques many post-structuralist ideas while performing them, which again reminds me of Beckett -- and I have to apologize for that, but I did my master's degree on Joyce and Beckett, so when it comes to this kind of material, they're the first people that come to my mind.

As for making new, I have no problem with that, per se, but if we look at the history of philosophy that took the old ideas and made them new, they also generally made them known. There's a good deal of mid-era Nietzsche in Derrida, yet Nietzsche, even writing in his semi-poetic aphoristic form, is actively more lucid than Derrida about similar topics: Nietzsche suggests the idea of truth is contingent, and Derrida tries to demonstrate that through performative prose, while Rorty instead analyzes and applies the idea. When it comes to the usefulness of one interpretation of Nietzsche over another, in that case I find Rorty much more usable than Derrida. It's rather like finding an old recipe for bread written in, say, Sumerian; one translation is an abstract painting of the recipe, while another translation is descriptive English prose. If I want to make the bread or improve on the recipe, I'm going to have better luck with the English translation than the abstract painting.

This isn't to say there's something wrong with abstract painting; just that the roots of post-structuralism stretch back into finding a discourse appropriate to critique such works. I'm just not convinced PS/PM criticism accomplishes that, in part because of its fidelity to the initial abstraction. In fact, it seems to me a better discourse for critiquing abstract art may be other art; after all, much abstract art began as a critique of previous art in the first place. (Beckett's Endgame provides a better commentary on Waiting for Godot than many critics.)

I think the point about post-structuralism being poetry or art is an interesting one. I've had many professors claim that difficult theory -- Butler or Cixous or Jameson, for instance -- is meant to be read like literature (see above). The problem, though, is most people read literature for different purposes than philosophy (and I doubt you could put anything by Spivak or Bhaba in the fiction section and have it reach a fiction-reading audience). One may find a perfecly literary turn of phrase in the analysis of an algorithm, but one doesn't read such analyses for their literary language; rather, they read them for what the hell the algorithm can do.

That's not to say useful philosophical insights can't be gained from fiction (Borges, Lispector, Kafka, even G.B. Shaw), and that's not to say that philosophical critiques can't usefully adopt literary forms into their presentations. Arguably the most useful parts of Derrida's "Plato's Pharmakon" are the myth tropes he and the parable he uses to demonstrate his thinking; at the same time, arguably the clunkiest Nietzsche is his literary attempts in Zarathustra -- and I fully concede that the warrant here is the utility of the criticism, i.e. whether the communicated information can be interpreted and in turn applied to produce new knowledge. But trying to analyze an older philosophical position through philosopho-literary language feels a bit too much like trying to analyze a joke -- you lose the heart of it.

"Defensibility" is probably a better way to put it than "truth/falsity," but that always leaves an illogical way out: Premise A.) One dude can dig a post-hole in 60 secondsPremise B.) Sixty dudes can dig 60 post-holes in 60 secondsConclusion) Sixty dudes can dig one post-hole in 1 second.

That's logical -- it can be defended to an extent -- but it doesn't make sense. This starts to get down to what we mean by truth/falsity, but perhaps logic helps here. As far as authorial intentions go -- no doubt useful readings work their way into a work unconsciously. I once interviewed Joe Sacco about some splash pages in his book Palestine where the narrative boxes made the shape of a question mark across the page; this was during the part of the book where he was separated from his translator and didn't know if he was being kidnapped or not. When I showed him the outlines his narrative boxes made on the splash pages, he said he'd never noticed that before, but he'd take credit for it. But that's defensible with evidence, and in general our criteria for determining whether something is true or false is if the claim defensible with evidence -- and when new evidence emerges, those determinations can be changed (just like in science). So Sacco's question marks are defensible; but one could also easily claim Kubrick's monolith is a metonym for a pink elephant, but that's just not defensible.

As a side-note, I wrote a grad paper about Beowulf and how he managed to rip off the Grendel's arm. Only a few articles had been written about how that actually happened, and none of the writers had any experience in any form of martial combat, like wrestling (I do). They made what seemed like perfectly defensible claims, at least to those who didn't know wrestling or jujitsu; but for someone who understood those sports, their claims were complete nonsense and made no physical sense -- they were drawing on pro wrestling, an Icelandic form of belt wrestling called glima, etc., and none of them would actually work. Yet those articles passed the peer review process and became part of the scholarly debate. So were they defensible? At least to those who didn't know real grappling (which was apparently all the Anglo-Saxonists on those review boards).

But were they true? Hell no. The key line is "ond wið earm gesæt," which is usually translated as Beowulf grasped Grendel with his hand. It's the wið that's key; it's usually translated as our meaning of with, but in Anglo-Saxon can also mean against -- "and he sat against the arm." Any grappler knows that this is the beginning of a move that pushes the arm against the shoulder joint; you can see ancient descriptions of it on Sumerian stellae. If Beowulf sat against the arm, he's using a well-known grappling technique. Incidentally, the year I wrote that paper, a U. of Iowa heavyweight did the same thing in the NCAA semifinals against the Iowa State heavyweight, and whadaya know, he ripped the Iowa State's shoulder out of its socket. Add a little literary license, and you get an arm being ripped off. So the originally articles may have been defensible, but they weren't necessarily true.

Why not just fucking say it, instead of cloaking such a banal observation in needless verbiage?

Because if they do say it clearly and concisely they get bad grades as undergrads, that's why. (and later, they can't justify being in their academic positions if anyone can just plainly understand what they say and answer back...)

True story, happened to my sister, which was funny. We were talking about it when she was a freshman in social sciences. I said that "these people" manage to say nothing but "the sky is blue" in 300 words. She then admitted that it seemed to be the case... At her first test she answered as a normal person, because that's how she'd always done it. Got bad grade. Then she got smart and started answering the questions in the pompous, circular, confusing style she saw the texts written in, and grades "magically" got much better. She admits she was saying exactly the same thing in both instances. It was the WAY of saying it, not the content, that mattered. If one believes her accuracy there, of course... I don't know whether now, as a PhD student, she has already lost her ability to write clearly and concisely yet though... But since she's already "part of the tribe", it is unfortunately likely the case.

Now, some people argue that it is their "jargon", that things have their own significance, and like to point out that they don't understand other fields either. Physics seems to be a favorite to mention in these cases.

I don't buy that. Rationalizing BS, I'm afraid.

See, the typical paper title in Biology or Physics can be mostly unintelligible to the layperson. But for a very different reason. The use of "strange" words and symbols in those disciplines is to convey MORE clarity to the text, and to make the text LESS long. Not the opposite, as seems to be the case in parts of other areas under discussion here. Each word or symbol might need a whole sentence (or paragraph, or page, or more) to express in regular words. The tech terms and symbols have very well defined and rigorous meanings. Hopefully. They are powerful shortcuts that can be learned by anyone. Page space is VERY tight in scientific journals, and nowadays there is a lot of "supplementary material" online to help with that -- which is not always a good thing, frequently making the papers less cohesive, less self-contained.

That's probably why some scholars mentioned here are so clear and nice when talking, and horrible when in writing. It's on purpose, even if by now it's probably unconscious and unchangeable.

I can appreciate where you're coming from, J, but let's apply the same kind of scrutiny we'd expect in hard sciences.

First, your sister's story is an anecdote. There's no way for us to evaluate what magical language she used to describe how the sky was blue.

Second, she was studying social sciences: New students to a field always have to learn the vocabulary and "powerful shortcuts" that comprise the research. You're area is genomes; would any of your professors stand for a student calling mitochondrial DNA "those squiggly things inside the round things"? Sometimes the WAY of saying something is as important as what's being said. It's not always rationalizing BS; mitochondrial DNA is biological jargon that does have its own significance.

Example: I once blew out my LCL in my right knee; if my doctor had said "You got a booboo on the ropey thing that holds the top of your leg to the bottom," I'd have gotten another doctor. Likewise, if my doctor refused to explain the rupture off my fibula just because I hadn't been to medical school, I'd have gotten another doctor. It seems to me if an academic can't translate and break down complex ideas without falling into a jargon jail, they probably don't have the concept all that well worked out.

If, as you said, the fifty-cent words actually trace back to recognizable concepts and can be used as short-hand for space-sparse publications, that's one thing. And you're right to point out that if tracing back a term does more to obscure a concept than clarify it, that needs to be called out. But it'd be incorrect to conflate difficult verbiage with deliberate obfuscation.

And that's where you lost me; the discussion was about icons of postmodernist thought, not biologists or physicists. So I'm not sure who are the scholars mentioned here that are clear when talking but horrible in writing; the ones under discussion are generally clear as mud. But I think the point of this discussion to find a way to discern rationalizing BS from the reasonable, and not to paint the difficult with the "crafty liar" broad brush. Not every postmodernist is necessarily opaque: Joyce left a hefty trail of powerful shortcuts showing how Ulysses worked, and many scholars are perfectly clear when discussing him; but the cult critics noted above often attempt to be as complex as Joyce when discussing his work. When trying to communicate a difficult concept, complexity of communication isn't a virtue; clarity is. But let's not assume if a lay person doesn't get it on first read that it's clearly BS.

I do want to point out one possibility though, with the reading of Beowulf. While you're reading sounds the most defensible (and I'm so glad my semester of Old English isn't going to waste), there are two other possibilities:

One, the way the language has come down to us has been corrupted, and with did not mean against in the way that we use the word against (unlikely, but possible).

Two, the original writer really did mean that the arm was pulled straight out (or was using more creative license than if he was just referencing the grappling move you thought he used [with only a little creative license]).

Your reading still sounds the most defensible, and I dig your other points.

I just think the work of the humanities is less about making "true" readings of the past than it is using our readings of the past to tell us about the world we live in...

If you're not easily spooked and want to see that move in action, it happened in Japan during a New Year's Eve mixed martial arts fight. Japanese jujitsu fighter Shinya Aoki did the same type of move to another Japanese fighter named Hirota. It's also the same type of move the Iowa wrestler did to the Iowa State wrestler in the NCAA semi-finals in I think 2004.

You can find Aoki's video on the interwebs pretty easily, so I'll save the squeamish by not posting any links. (Email me if you want a link.) Needless to say, it was an ugly scene; Hirota should have tapped out but refused, and I think the ref should have stopped the fight. Neither the other fighter, nor the ref, nor the other fighter's corner was stopping the wrist lock, so Aoki just walked it up past 90 degrees and snapped his upper arm in half to end the fight. I was watching that with my dad and wife, and we all stopped to note how that was the kind of move I wrote about with regard to Beowulf. (Truth be told, I'm hoping to work on a book about the history of wrestling in literature and culture, resulting in MMA as the sport of globalization.)

I follow your point about how wið might have come down to us meaning something other than it originally did, and the OE sources are scant -- there are only a few sources for wið meaning against. But I think the backing data comes from Old Norse and Icelandic. Old Norse and Old English were close enough that a speaker of one one could reasonably understand the other language -- kind of like how Spanish speakers can follow along with Italian or Portuguese. Icelandic is the closest thing to Old Norse that we currently have today, and they've kept great Old Norse records. So the ON version of wið is við, which means "reaching to, against, or with" (with about 37 attributions). The term reaching seems to give the against reading a bit more support -- 'he reached against the arm'.

So yeah, I can't be certain that's exactly how Beowulf ripped Grendel's arm off, but given the other scholarly options available and the 21st century evidence of the two broken arms, that particular move makes the most sense to me.

Oh -- the same move is being done in the famous Greek statue of the Pankrationists.

I remember when I first entered graduate school, I was so taken aback by all this pomo language at one of the centres of pomo thoughts, University of California, Santa Cruz. I was desperate to understand. After all, it was the "hip" thing and I mean, I guess I should understand it! Well, I came to the conclusion that so much of pomo writing is just poor executed. Graduate students (and I would say faculty too!) can sometimes fall into the habit of posturing through obfuscatory writing and remarks.